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TRANSCRIPT
English Department
Year 11 Handbook
Set Texts
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- An Inspector Calls by J.B Priestley
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare
- Power and Conflict Poetry Cluster
Welcome to GCSE English Language and
English Literature!
You will study both English Language and English Literature at KS4
which means that, at the end of Year 11, you will be leaving Compass
School with two English GCSEs!
We follow the AQA specification for both qualifications and the
breakdown of each is outlined below.
English Language English Literature Paper 1: Explorations in Creative
Reading and Writing (50%)
Section A: Reading 4 questions in response to an unseen piece
of fiction. Section B: Writing
1 extended creative piece
Paper 1: Shakespeare and the 19th Century Novel (40%)
Section A: Reading
4 questions in response to 2 unseen non-fiction pieces.
Section B: Writing 1 extended writing piece that presents a
viewpoint. Paper 2: Writers’ Viewpoints and
Perspectives (50%)
Section A Shakespeare: students will answer one question on their play of
choice. They will be required to write in detail about an extract from the play and then to write about the play as a whole.
Section B The 19th-century novel: students will answer one question on their novel of
choice. They will be required to write in detail about an extract from the novel and then to write about the novel as a whole.
Paper 2: Modern Texts and Poetry (60%)
Section A Modern texts: students will answer
one essay question from a choice of two on their
studied modern prose or drama text.
Section B Poetry: students will answer one
comparative question on one named poem
printed on the paper and one other poem from
their chosen anthology cluster.
Section C Unseen poetry: Students will
answer one question on one unseen poem and
one question comparing this poem with a
second unseen poem.
Understanding Assessment Objectives
GCSEs are marked using Assessment Objectives set out by the exam board
(AOs). It is important that you understand the AOs so that you can make sure
you are meeting all of them in your work.
English Language Assessment Objectives
AO1:
o identify and interpret explicit and implicit information and ideas
o select and synthesise evidence from different texts
AO2: Explain, comment on and analyse how writers use language and structure to achieve effects and
influence readers, using relevant subject terminology to support their views
AO3: Compare writers’ ideas and perspectives, as well as how these are conveyed, across two or
more texts
AO4: Evaluate texts critically and support this with appropriate textual references
AO5: Communicate clearly, effectively and imaginatively, selecting and adapting tone, style and
register for different forms, purposes and audiences. Organise information and ideas, using structural
and grammatical features to support coherence and cohesion of texts
AO6: Candidates must use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and
effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation. (This requirement must constitute 20% of the marks
for each specification as a whole.)
English Literature Assessment Objectives
AO1: Read, understand and respond to texts. Students should be able to:
- maintain a critical style and develop an informed personal response
- use textual references, including quotations, to support and illustrate interpretations.
AO2: Analyse the language, form and structure used by a writer to create meanings and effects, using
relevant subject terminology where appropriate.
AO3: Show understanding of the relationships between texts and the contexts in which they were
written.
AO4: Use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate
spelling and punctuation.
Term 1: A Christmas Carol
You will tackle this question on Literature Paper 1: Shakespeare and the 19th
Century Novel. Here is what the question will look like on the exam:
This question is worth 30 marks and will require an essay response of
around 700-800 words.
Model Response
In this extract we see how the Cratchit family are happy despite their poverty. The novella was
published in 1843, which was in the middle of the industrial revolution, so many people were
moving into cities, leading them to become overcrowded and therefore poverty-stricken. This
poverty is evident there in the quote “the family display of glass”, which we then learn consists of
“two tumblers” and a “custard-cup without a handle”. The word “display” shows just how little they
own, as they seem proud to showcase these small, dilapidated objects off, as this is all they have.
However, they seem content as such trivial matters don’t change how they feel towards each other.
Dickens compares the cups to “golden goblets”, which to me suggests that the Cratchits feel
enriched simply by each others’ company, which is worth more to them than anything materialistic.
Earlier in the same scene, we learn just how vibrant the scene is among this family when Dickens
personifies even the potatoes, saying they were “knocking” to get out of their pan, as if the joyous
atmosphere was so desirable to be amongst that even inanimate objects wanted to be part of the
festivities. In the extract we are told that the chestnuts cracked “noisily”, which conveys the same
idea, building a feeling of community despite the poverty in the scene.
The Ghost of Christmas Present first takes Scrooge to see the Cratchits’ Christmas, which makes him
realise the importance of family at this time, then continues this theme of company by showing him
other scenes brought to life by Christmas spirit. For example, when the ghost takes him to a
lighthouse, the poor workers there are described as having “horny hands”. This suggests that they
have struggled through great hardships and have suffered more in their lives than Scrooge ever
would, and yet their show of unison when they all sing together at Christmas let them disregard
their struggles for a time.
One member of the Cratchit family who strongly highlights the struggles of the poor is Tiny Tim. In
this extract, his hand is decribed as a “withered little hand”, suggesting it has prematurely withered
like a flower with no light. As the word “withered” has connotations of a flower, to me, this could
perhaps be seen as a metaphor for how something beautiful has been hindered and killed by the
tight-fistedness of the rich in society, which is something that Dickens was strongly trying to convey
in this novella. Light is often a symbol of hope, so this flower could be shrivelled due to a lack of
light, which is the lack of generosity from the upper classes. Dickens may have intended “withered
little” as a juxtaposition, as we would normally associate “withered” with old age and “little” with
childhood. This contrast highlights how wrong it is that an innocent child should be so shunned by
society due to his wealth and status, and this demonstrates Dickens’ frustration over the inequality.
Dickens uses a similar adjective to describe the hands of the children Ignorance and Want. The word
“shrivelled” is used here, which compares these children, who are also victims of the struggles of
poverty, to Tiny Tim. It creates a similar image of premature decay to highlight the neglect of lower
classes in society. The boy in this scene represents ignorance, and the Ghost of Christmas Present
tells Scrooge to “most of all beware the boy”. This strongly conveys Dickens’ message about poverty
and the poor, as he is trying to tell society that ignoring the struggles and problems of the poor will
be their downfall. This is demonstrated in stave 4 when Tiny Tim dies, and the Cratchits say that
when Bob had Tiny Tim on his shoulders he walked “very fast indeed”. When we have a weight on
our shoulders, the phrase normally implies a burden and a worry, however here I think that Tiny Tim
represents the burden that the rich think the poor impose upon society. Here, Dickens could be
saying that if we only realised the potential of the poor, they may actually prove helpful and
contribute to society, however they are seen only as a dead weight on the shoulders of society due
to the ignorance of the rich.
The origins of A Christmas Carol Article by:John Sutherland Themes:Poverty and the working classes, London, The novel 1832–1880 Published:15 May 2014
Professor John Sutherland considers how Dickens’s A Christmas Carolengages with
Victorian attitudes towards poverty, labour and the Christmas spirit.
Prince Albert – the newly installed husband of Queen Victoria – is popularly associated with institutionalising the British family Christmas, an institution which is still with us. It was Albert, for example, who brought from his native Germany the tannenbaum, or Christmas Tree. 1841 is the normally given as the date for this happy importation. The Christmas tree replaced the traditional British ‘yule log’ – wood designed to give winter warmth, not something to deck with pretty lights, fairies, favours and (round its base) presents. Both the tannenbaum and the Yule log (along with mistletoe) were incorporated into Christian festivity from pre-Christian pagan rituals associated with the seasonal turn of the year – the rebirth of the land and the green gods. There is no Biblical warrant for Christ’s day of birth being 25 December.
Shortly after the arrival of the Christmas tree into the British parlour, Dickens, with A Christmas Carol, institutionalised what one could call the modern 'spirit of Christmas’. Dickens subtitled his story ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’. The ghosts are imported from folklore and legend, not the Christian gospels. The famous spirit of Christmas designed by the artist John Leech for the first edition of A Christmas Carol clearly draws on classic pagan iconography:
Dickens had warm memories of his own childhood Christmases and, now the father of a young family (as was Prince Albert), made the annual event a merry holiday. Feasting, games, and domestic dramas were the order of the ‘twelve days of Christmas’ in the 1840s Dickens household.
Money lending, scratching pens and ghosts
A Christmas Carol opens with Ebenezer Scrooge in his chilly ‘counting house’ on Christmas Eve (Stave 1). Outside London, the ‘great wen’ is shrouded in filthy brown fog. It is the ‘hungry forties’. The 1840s saw huge distress among the working classes and mass starvation in Ireland. ‘Chartism (a working-class reformist movement) raised the fearful possibility of revolution. It was a nervous time.
Opposite Scrooge’s door a dying woman is sitting in the gutter – ghosts of rich businessmen dancing around her. It is they who have brought her to this sad pass.
, seven years previously, Scrooge is the sole proprietor Scrooge & Marley. He is a money lender. He lends money, but he is not inclined to part with money. Two gentlemen, soliciting charitable donations, are dismissed with an angry ‘Bah! Humbug!’. Another visitor, his nephew, injudiciously wishes his uncle a merry Christmas: ‘Merry Christmas!’, explodes Scrooge, ‘every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding!’ The nephew, like the two gentlemen, is ‘humbugged’ off (Stave 1).
At the end of his 12-hour day Scrooge dismisses his clerk, Bob Cratchit. Cratchit – his name evokes a scratching pen – is a ‘scrivener’. Before typewriters and photocopying machines, the necessary copying of business and legal documents was done long hand. The typewriter girl was 40 years in the future. Cratchit has one day’s holiday a year, and earns 15 shillings (75p) per six-day week: half a crown a day. On it he supports a large, happy, but chronically hard-up family. The family favourite is Tiny Tim, a little ‘cripple’ boy (on his father’s shoulder, in the illustration below):
That Christmas Eve Scrooge, alone in his cold empty house is destined to be haunted. First by his partner, Marley, doomed to wander forever as penance for his hard-heartedness.
Then, overnight, the miser is visited by three spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. In the last visitation, Scrooge is shown his own gravestone and realises the worthlessness of a life devoted to money-grubbing.
Scrooge wakes up – it is Christmas morning and he is a changed man. From now on he will be good-hearted: good-hearted most of all to the Cratchit family and Tiny Tim, to whom he will be a year-round Father Christmas.
How a society treats its children
How a society treats its children, Dickens believed, is the true test of that society’s moral worth. His religious beliefs were complicated, as are most people’s. But very simply, he favoured the New Testament over the Old. He wrote a version of the gospels for his own children, The Life of our Lord, four years after A Christmas Carol. Dickens, we can assume from the centrality of childish innocence in his fiction, was particularly moved by Christ’s injunction: ‘Except ye … become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven’. Christmas celebrates the birth of a child. So does all Dickens’s great fiction: not least A Christmas Carol.
The first stirrings of the tale can be found in a visit Dickens made to Manchester a month before he began writing. One of the great orators of his time (only fragments of his eloquence, alas, survive) he spoke at the city’s Athenaeum on 5 October.
It was a memorable evening for those present, and those who read accounts of the speech in the next day’s papers. As Dickens’s biographer, Michael Slater, describes:
Dickens dwelt on the terrible sights he had seen among the juvenile population in London's jails and doss-houses and stressed the desperate need for educating the poor. This occasion seems to have put into his mind the idea for a [Christmas Eve tale] which should help to open the hearts of the prosperous and powerful towards the poor and powerless but which should also bring centrally into play the theme of memory that, as we have seen, was always so strongly associated with Christmas for him.
The Athenaeum speech was also an opening shot in his campaign, which bore fruit eight years later, to get a public library for the adult working classes in the city. Nor were children forgotten. They too needed the printed word. In the early 1840s Dickens took a particular interest in ‘ragged schools’. As he described them, in an article in 1846:
The name implies the purpose. They who are too ragged, wretched, filthy, and forlorn, to enter any other place: who could gain admission into no charity school, and who would be driven from any church door; are invited to come in here, and find some people not depraved, willing to teach them something, and show them some sympathy, and stretch a hand out, which is not the iron hand of Law, for their correction.
Industry, poverty and utilitarianism
Manchester – the ‘workshop of the world’ – was famous not merely for its industry but the utilitarian philosophy that drove it. It may not be clear what Scrooge’s line of business is. But his beliefs, before his change of heart, are crystal clear – pure Manchester.
‘Are there no workhouses?’ he asks, when the two gentleman ask for a charitable donation. If the poor die (like the poor woman outside his house) it will, he says, solve ‘the surplus population’ problem (Stave 3; Stave 1). Concern with over-population had been stimulated by the stern
philosophy of Thomas Robert Malthus who foresaw catastrophe for England if its masses were not ‘checked’ by famine, war, or disease. For the more thoughtful, the anxiety was fostered by the census which, since 1821, had been counting how many inhabitants there were in the country. In 1841 the figure was approaching 29 million – there were serious doubts as to whether British agriculture could feed them, something which led to the repeal of the Corn Laws, in 1846, allowing cereals to be imported from the New World.
The 1840s were not merely ‘hungry’ but hard hearted. It was a philosophy embodied in Ebenezer Scrooge - not merely a solitary miser (like, for example, George Eliot’s Silas Marner) but the ‘spirit of the age’ in human (and, arguably, inhuman) form. Hard heads, hard hearts, good business. Soft heads and soft hearts lead to the bankruptcy court, Scrooge would have said. Dickens disagreed.
Children worked, like slaves, in Manchester factories (as Michael Slater points out, the chimneys in the background of John Leech’s illustration of the destitute children ‘Ignorance and Want’ are more reminiscent of Manchester’s industrial landscape than of London streets). Six months after A Christmas Carol was published the 1844 Factories Act decreed, however, that 9–13 year olds could only work nine hours a day, six days a week. This was regarded as a humane reform.
Why were they wanted for this work? Children were cheap labour but, more importantly, their fingers were small and dexterous. But the machines were dangerous. There were crippled Tiny Tims by the hundred in Manchester.
The modern reader – of whatever age – is less sensitive to sentimentality than our Victorian forebears. At Dickens’s readings from his novels, audiences would regularly be moved to open tears by, for example, the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, or the murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist. One suspects that many Victorian tears were shed over the foreseen (but happily forestalled) death of Tiny Tim.
Dickens designed the externals of his book with the meticulous care he applied to its contents. It would be, he instructed his publishers, a handsome five-shilling production: ‘Brown-salmon fine-ribbed cloth, blocked in blind and gold on front; in gold on the spine … all edges gilt’. Dickens spared no expense. John Leech’s half-dozen illustrations should be coloured, he instructed. The result was a book whose production costs, and relatively high price (five shillings), meant that this most popular of works returned, on its first 5,000-copy print run, small profit for Dickens.
The first edition shot off the bookshop shelves even before Christmas Day 1843. And A Christmas Carol has sold massively ever since. It is the most filmed, and TV-adapted of his works. And, one suspects, as long as there is Christmas, there will be Dickens’s wonderful tale alongside it and Tiny Tim’s benediction, ‘God Bless Us, Everyone’.
Key Words and Spellings
Please add your own as we read
Altruistic Epiphany Archetype Misanthropic Resolution
Facetious Impropriety Purgatory Antithesis Exposition
Antagonistic Covetous Equilibrium Unhallowed Portmanteau
Miser Redemption Condemned Spectre Empathise
Bitter Intimation Foil Solemnised Protagonist
Isolated Miser Allegory Skinflint Antagonist
Solitary Purgatory Limbo Philanthropic Construct
Hostile Aggressive Salvation Foreshadowing Intrusive
Colloquial Agitate Benevolent Charitable Condescension
Destitute Endeavour Facetious Humility Impropriety
Key Contextual Information (AO3)
Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, and spent the first nine years of his
life living in the coastal regions of Kent, a county in southeast England. Dickens'
father, John, was a kind and likable man, but he was financially irresponsible, piling
up tremendous debts throughout his life. When Dickens was nine, his family moved
to London. At twelve, his father was arrested and sent to debtors' prison. Dickens'
mother moved seven of their children into prison with their father but arranged for
Cha rles to live alone outside the prison, working with other child laborers at a hellish
job pasting labels on bottles in a blacking warehouse.
The three months Charles spent apart from his family were severely traumatic. He
viewed his job as a miserable trap--he considered himself too good for it, stirring the
contempt of his worker-companions. After his father was released from prison,
Dickens returned to school, eventually becoming a law clerk. He went on to serve as
a court reporter before taking his place as one of the most popular English novelists
of his time. At age 25, Dickens completed his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, which
met with great success. This started his career as an English literary celebrity, during
which he produced such masterpieces as Great Expectations,David
Copperfield, and A Tale of Two Cities.
Dickens' beloved novella A Christmas Carol was written in 1843, with the intention of
drawing readers' attention to the plight of England's poor. (Social criticism, a
recurring theme in Dickens' work, resounds most strongly in his novel Hard Times.)
In the tale, Dickens stealthily combines a somewhat indirect description of hardships
faced by the poor with a heart-rending, sentimental celebration of the Christmas
season. The calloused character of the apathetic penny-pinching Ebenezer Scrooge,
who opens his heart after being confronted by three spirits, remains one of Dickens'
most widely recognized and popular creations.
A Christmas Carol takes the form of a relatively simplistic allegory--it is seldom
considered one of Dickens' important literary contributions. The novella's emotional
depth, brilliant narration, and endearing characters, however, offer plenty of rewards
for literature students, Dickensian fans, and Grinches alike.
Term 2: An Inspector Calls
You will tackle this question on Literature Paper 2: Modern Texts and Poetry.
Here is what the question will look like:
You will be given the choice of two questions: you must only answer one!
There is no extract provided this time; you must be able to quote from
memory!
Model Answer
In An Inspector Calls, JB Priestley uses the character of Mrs Birling to portray a typical
higher-class woman. In multiple occasions in the play, Mrs Birling (Sybil) is presented as
dismissive and a snob. This behaviour is evident from the very start of the play where she
tells off her husband for thanking the chef in front of a guest, Gerald. She says “Arthur,
you’re not supposed to say such things.” This authoritative tone of Mrs Birling shows that
she takes pride in her social respectability and so wants her whole family to not ruin it. Mrs
Birling is from a higher social status than Mr Birling so she is socially superior. This is a
reason why she is telling off Mr Birling as well. We learn that she takes high responsibility in
social etiquette, which are the ways society expects you to behave.
In the same conversation, JB Priestley presents Mrs Birling as traditional in the lines “Sheila,
the things you girls pick up these days.” Here it is clear that Sybil is quite ashamed of the
language that her daughter is using because it is not sophisticated and not how the higher
class should talk. The repeated telling off of two members in her family echoes and
emphasises her social superiority. The collective noun “girls” shows that Mrs Birling is
distancing herself from them and is appalled that Sheila is part of them, and not behaving
traditionally. This again shows that Mrs Birling is a bit of a snob and so presents her as an
unlikeable character.
When the Inspector arrives and begins interrogating the family members, both Mr and Mrs
Birling tried to use a commanding tone and their social influence to get him to leave but he
does not. As each character’s acts are revealed, Mrs Birling repeatedly shows no sympathy
for Eva Smith. This echoes her social class because she as a higher class woman was not
expected to feel sympathy for the lower class person. This however contrast with the charity
that Mrs Birling runs for woman in need. Therefore, the audience can think that Mrs Birling
is not running the charity for the good of lower class woman but more to earn social respect
and show off her status. This presents her as an unlikeable character because she is selfish,
self-centred and doesn’t really care about the good of those in lower classes.
When Gerald confesses that he had Eva Smith, but at the time known as Daisy Renton (with
Renton suggesting (renting and prostitution), as a mistress, Mrs Birling is appalled as says
“that’s disgusting”. Here, Mrs Birling’s dismissive attitude is showing that she is totally
against the idea of men having mistress but she doesn’t further accuse Gerald, which could
suggest that she is aware it happens with higher class men and so accepts it. When she is
interrogated by the Inspector, Mrs Birling repeatedly lies and tries to avoid the truth but the
Inspector starts asking deliberate questions to prevent her from doing this. This behaviour
presents Mrs Birling as a snob and shows off her higher class attitude because she is trying
to avoid the truth and make it suit her. When she finally does reveal that she “used her
influence” to deny Eva Smith from receiving help at her charity she says “unlike the other
three, I am not ashamed of what I did”. Here Mrs Birling is distancing herself from the rest
of the family to try and keep up her respectability. By doing this, she is once again presented
as a snob and it suggests that Mrs Birling feels more strongly towards building up and
protecting her social respect than her care for her family. This is further emphasised later in
the play when Eric says “You never loved me”. This quote provides evidence to Mrs Birling’s
attitude towards her family because it states that she never showed love towards her
children. Therefore, due to her lack of motherly responsibilities and love that every child
deserves to receive, she is presented as an unlikable character.
Mrs Birling tries to blame someone else to avoid her reputation being ruined. When she
confesses that she prevented Eva Smith from receiving help, she begins blaming the father
who “impregnated” Eva Smith. The Inspector’s cleverness is showed in this part of the play
because he has laid a trap for Mrs Birling and she has fallen straight into it. This suggests
that Mrs Birling is not very smart, unlike Sheila who realises and tries to warn her but Sybil
doesn’t listen. Mrs Birling says that the father should make a “public confession” and that
there should be “a scandal” about this. This echoes to her dismissive tone as she is again
trying to blame someone else. She doesn’t even think that the man could be her son and
this is being she is of too high of a class that she can’t even imagine that. When she does
find out, she bursts into tears and can’t bear what her son has done. In this situation, the
audience will feel some sympathy towards her but others (especially lower class audience)
will think that she deserves this for her inhuman attitudes to the lower class. This attitude is
evident when she says “a girl of that sort”. Here she is referring to Eva but is distancing her
and showing no sympathy to her situation by classing her in a group of people who are not
appreciated by society. As a result of this, she is seen as an unlikeable character.
When Sybil finds out that the Inspector is a hoax, she instantly forgets all that had happened
that evening and goes back to what she was doing earlier on. By showing no remorse for Eva
Smith through the character of Mrs Birling, JB Priestley is suggesting that there is no chance
that the higher class can change to be able to have equal rights and equal morals. He speaks
to his audience through the voice of the Inspector where he says “We are all members of
one body”. This states that we are all the same kind, we are all human beings, so everyone
needs to treat each other equally and as they would be liked to be treated. JB Priestley
contrast Mrs Birling’s character with Sheila’s to show that there is hope in the younger
generation for change. This is evident when Sheila says “between us we have killed a girl”.
This shows that Sheila feels strongly guilty for her actions and shows remorse but Mrs
Birling doesn’t accept this. In fact she criticizes Mr Birling for not interrogating the Inspector
at the start, or letting her question him at the start of the evening. This emphasises how Mrs
Birling has behaved throughout the course of the play and shows that she has not changed
one bit. This presents her as unlikeable because she is showing no sympathy for Eva and JB
Priestley has intentionally made the character of Mrs Birling unlikeable to show that there is
no hope in the older generation for changing and accepting moral views, but there is hope
in the younger generation.
An introduction to An Inspector Calls Article by:Chris Power Themes:Power and conflict, Exploring identity, 20th-century theatre Published:7 Sep 2017
Chris Power introduces An Inspector Calls as a morality play that denounces the
hypocrisy and callousness of capitalism and argues that a just society can only be
achieved if all individuals feel a sense of social responsibility.
J B Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls, first performed in 1945, is a morality play disguised as a detective thriller. The morality play is a very old theatrical form, going back to the medieval period, which sought to instruct audiences about virtue and evil. Priestley’s play revolves around a central mystery, the death of a young woman, but whereas a traditional detective story involves the narrowing down of suspects from several to one, An Inspector Calls inverts this process as, one by one, nearly all the characters in the play are found to be guilty. In this way, Priestley makes his larger point that society is guilty of neglecting and abusing its most vulnerable members. A just society, he states through his mysterious Inspector, is one that respects and exercises social responsibility.
What is social responsibility?
Social responsibility is the idea that a society’s poorer members should be helped by those who have more than them. Priestley was a socialist, and his political beliefs are woven through his work. There are many different types and degrees of socialism, but a general definition is as follows: an ideal socialist society is one that is egalitarian – in other words, its citizens have equal rights and the same opportunities are available to everybody; resources are shared out fairly, and the means of production (the facilities and resources for producing goods) are communally owned.
Therefore, socialism stands in opposition to a capitalist society, such as ours, where trade and industry is mostly controlled by private owners, and these individuals or companies keep the profits made by their businesses, rather than distributing them evenly between the workers whose labour produced them.
It is precisely this difference between a socialist and a capitalist society that Arthur Birling is discussing in Act 1 when Inspector Goole arrives:
But the way some of these cranks talk and write now, you’d think everybody has to look after everybody else, as if we were all mixed up together like bees in a hive – a man has to mind his own business and look after himself…
The Inspector’s arrival cuts Arthur Birling off mid-sentence, enacting in miniature the clash between two ideological positions that unfolds throughout the rest of the play.
The play’s structure and setting
An Inspector Calls is a three-act play with one setting: the dining room of ‘a fairly large suburban house belonging to a fairly prosperous manufacturer’. The year is 1912, and we are in the home of the Birling family in the fictional industrial city of Brumley in the North Midlands. In the dining room five people are finishing their dinner: four members of the Birling family and one guest. Arthur Birling is a factory owner; his wife Sibyl is on the committee of a charity, and is usually scolding someone for a social mistake. Their adult children are Sheila and Eric, and their guest is Gerald Croft, Sheila’s fiancé, who is from a wealthier manufacturing family than the Birlings. One
other person is present: Edna the maid, who is going back and forth to the sideboard with dirty plates and glasses.
Priestley’s description of the set at the beginning of the play script stresses the solidity of the Birlings' dining room: ‘It is a solidly built room, with good solid furniture of the period’. But a later section of this scene-setting – on the walls are ‘imposing but tasteless pictures and engravings’, and the ‘general effect is substantial and comfortable and old-fashioned but not cosy and homelike’ – suggests that although the Birling’s have wealth and social standing, they are not loving to one another or compassionate to others. The setting of the play in a single room also suggests their self-absorption, and disconnectedness from the wider world.
Priestley establishes each of the characters in this opening scene. Arthur Birling is a capitalist businessman through and through, entirely focussed on profit even when discussing the marriage of his daughter:
I’m sure you’ll make her happy. You’re just the kind of son-in-law I’ve always wanted. Your father and I have been friendly rivals in business for some time now – though Crofts Limited are both older and bigger than Birling and Company – and now you’ve brought us together, and perhaps we may look forward to the time when Crofts and Birlings are no longer competing but are working together – for lower costs and higher prices.
His wife Sibyl scolds him, telling him it isn’t the occasion for that kind of talk, establishing her as someone primarily interested in doing things properly and conforming to established social rules. Sheila, at this stage in the play, seems to be preoccupied by the thought of her marriage to Gerald, a privileged and deeply conservative man of 30, while the youngest Birling, Eric, appears more interested in the port going around the table than anything anyone is saying.
Priestley has some fun using this opening section to show how wrong Arthur Birling’s opinions are, thus positioning the play as anti-capitalist. He does this through the use of dramatic irony, having Arthur state opinions that the audience, with the advantage of hindsight, knows to be incorrect. When Eric mentions the likelihood of war – remember that the play is set two years before the outbreak of World War One – but was written and first performed 30 years later – Arthur cuts him off:
… you’ll hear some people say that war’s inevitable. And to that I say – fiddlesticks! The Germans don’t want war. Nobody wants war, except some half-civilised folks in the Balkans. And why? There’s too much at stake these days. Everything to lose and nothing to gain by war.
He goes on to describe an ocean liner that is clearly meant to be the Titanic (which sank in April 1912) as ‘unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable’, and suggests that in time, ‘let’s say, in the forties’, ‘all these Capital versus Labour agitations and all these silly little war scares’ will be long forgotten. In fact, as audiences in 1945 would have been keenly aware, the period between 1912 and 1945 saw a huge number of strikes, including the monumental General Strike of 1926, and not one but two global conflicts, the second of which had only recently ended.
Dramatic irony is rarely a subtle technique, but Priestley’s use of it is exceptionally blunt. This could be considered clumsy, but it underlines the fact that An Inspector Calls is a play with a point to make, and a character whose sole job is to make it.
The Inspector
When Inspector Goole arrives everything changes. He tells the Birlings and Gerald that a young woman, Eva Smith, has committed suicide by drinking disinfectant, and he has questions about the case. Over the course of the next two acts he will lay responsibility for Eva Smith’s death at the feet of each of the Birlings and Gerald Croft, showing how their indifference to social
responsibility has contributed to the death of this young woman. Or is it young women? He shows each person an identifying photograph of the dead woman one by one, leading Gerald to later suspect they were all shown photographs of different women.
But who is the Inspector? In the play’s penultimate twist, he is revealed not to be a police inspector at all, yet, as Eric states, ‘He was our Police Inspector, all right’. Details about him are scant. He says he is newly posted to Brumley, and he is impervious to Arthur Birling’s threats about his close relationship with the chief constable ‘I don’t play golf’, he tells Birling. ‘I didn’t suppose you did’, the industrialist replies: a brief exchange that makes a clear point about class, and the battle between egalitarianism and privilege. Beyond these sparse biographical details, the Inspector seems less like a person and more like a moral force, one which mercilessly pursues the wrongs committed by the Birlings and Gerald, demanding that they face up to the consequences of their actions. His investigation culminates in a speech that is a direct expression of Priestley’s own view of how a just society should operate, and is the exact antithesis of the speech Arthur Birling made in Act 1:
We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. We don’t live alone. Good night.
Hypocrisy
Throughout the course of the Inspector’s investigation, and the testimony of Gerald and each of the Birlings, the supposedly respectable city of Brumley is revealed to be a place of deep class divisions and hypocrisy. As Arthur Birling’s behaviour towards Eva makes clear, it is a place where factory owners exploit their workers as a matter of course – part of his ‘a man has to look after himself’ philosophy. Eric accuses his father of hypocrisy for sacking the dead girl after she asked for higher wages, because the Birling firm always seeks to sell their products at the highest possible prices.
This exploitation is not limited to the factories. In the testimony of Gerald, and later Eric, the Palace Theatre emerges as a place where prostitutes gather, and where the supposedly great and good of the town go to meet them. When Gerald first met Eva, as he describes it, she was trapped in a corner by ‘Old Joe Meggarty, half-drunk and goggle-eyed’. Sibyl Birling, scandalised, asks ‘surely you don’t mean Alderman Meggarty?’ An unsurprised Sheila tells her mother ‘horrible old Meggarty’ has a reputation for groping young women: the younger characters are either more knowledgeable or frank about the dark secrets of the city, whereas the older Birlings live in a dream world of respectability, or hypocritically turn a blind eye to any disreputable behaviour by supposedly respectable people.
The play begins with the characters’ corrupt, unpleasant natures safely hidden away (a respectable group in a respectable home, enjoying that most respectable event, an engagement party); it ends with naked displays of hypocrisy. When it is confirmed that Goole is not really a policeman, Arthur, Sibyl and Gerald immediately regain an unjustified sense of outrage. ‘Then look at the way he talked to me’, Arthur Birling complains. ‘He must have known I was an ex-Lord Mayor and a magistrate and so forth’. Once it is confirmed, in the play’s penultimate twist, that there is no suicide lying on a mortuary slab, they forget the immoral, uncharitable behaviour they were recently accused of – things, remember, that they undoubtedly did – and begin talking about getting away with things.
Only Sheila and Eric recognise and resist this hypocritical behaviour. ‘I suppose we’re all nice people now!’ Sheila remarks sarcastically. Earlier she broke off her engagement to Gerald, telling him ‘You and I aren’t the same people who sat down to dinner here’. Likewise, Eric angrily accuses his father of ‘beginning to pretend now that nothing’s really happened at all’. Priestley’s vision is cautiously optimistic insofar as the youngest characters are changed by the Inspector’s visit, while the older Birlings and Gerald appear to be too set in their beliefs to change them.
Eva Smith: Everywoman
The play leaves open the question of whether Eva Smith is a real woman (who sometimes uses different names, including Daisy Renton), or multiple people the Inspector pretends are one. There is no right answer here, and in terms of Priestley’s message it is beside the point: because his socialist principles demand that everyone should be treated the same, in his opinion abusing one working-class woman is equivalent to abusing all working-class women. Eva Smith is, therefore, not an individual victim, but a universal one.
This helps explain the effectiveness of the play’s final twist. Having discovered that Inspector Goole is not a real policeman, and that there is no dead woman called Eva Smith at the Brumley morgue, a phone call announces that a woman has killed herself, and an inspector is on his way to question the Birlings. The invented story Inspector Goole related has now come true. This seems a bizarre coincidence with which to end the play, but if we consider An Inspector Calls as a moral fable, and not as naturalistic theatre, it begins to seem much more like a logical, even inevitable, conclusion. The characters have been confronted with the error of their ways; some have repented, some have not. Now is the time for judgement, and for the watching audience to ask themselves, according to Priestley’s design, are any of these people like me?
Key Words and Spellings
Please add your own as we read
Misanthropic Capitalist Socialist Bourgeoisie Proletariat
Immature Avaricious Naïve Exploitation Omniscient
Construction Moral Portentous Superior Inferior
Squiffy Materialistic Archetypal Representative Irony
Infirmary Manufacturer Assertive Anxious Rebukes
Responsibility Snob Hysterical Patronising Prejudice
Reputation Shallow Compassion Perceptive Sympathy
Genuine Trivial Embarrassed Awkward Purposefulness
Authority Conscience
Key Contextual Information (AO3)
Born to a working-class family in Yorkshire, in the north of England, John Priestley,
who published under the name J. B. Priestley, wrote plays, novels, biographies,
travelogues, and assorted essays, many notable for their political engagement.
Priestley fought for England in the First World War, and the experience was
formative for him. He later studied literature and political science at Cambridge, and
on graduating began his career as an essayist, before branching out into other
genres. He wrote quickly and thoroughly, producing dozens of texts. He published
treatments of the lives of Charles Dickens and George Meredith, and a broader
historical assessment of literary art and its effect on people’s lives (Literature and
Western Man). Today, Priestley’s notoriety derives from his writing for the
theater. An Inspector Calls, the play with which he is most commonly associated,
opened in the Soviet Union in Russian translation after the Second World War, and
in London soon after. Reviews over the next decades of Inspector and his other
works were mixed, but a production of Inspector in the 1990s in London revived
interest. Priestley’s plays continue to be performed in the US and the UK.
An Inspector Calls might be understood in several contexts. First, it is an example of
immediate post-war drama, which means that it was written after World War Two.
Post-war dramas take up some of the economic, political, and social issues
prompting that conflict, including socialism versus free-market capitalism, democracy
versus fascism, and communal versus individual rights and privileges. It is also a
historical drama, as it is set in the run-up to the World War One. This produces
instances of dramatic irony throughout the play. Characters refer to the possibility of
World War One, and of later calamities that would seem, to the post-World War Two
audience, pivotal and lamentable landmarks in world history. The small-scale but
devastating violence described in the play points to the slaughter of many thousands
that will occur only a few years after its narrated action.
Second, An Inspector Calls marks the beginning of a turn from the literary period of
realism to what would later be called the postmodern, the absurdist, or the surreal.
Priestley’s play considers realistic characters in a realistic upper-middle-class
situation, and characters speak in “prose” rather than in “verse.” That is, the
characters’ language is closer to dialogue in a novel than to the speeches of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Othello, for example. In this way, Priestley draws on the
familial conflicts found in the plays of writers like Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and
Eugene O’Neill. But the presence of the “Inspector” marks within An Inspector
Calls the possibility of actions beyond rational reasoning. Priestley’s work can be
viewed as a hinge between more realistic plays of the early twentieth century and the
darker, less plot-driven, and more openly experimental dramas of writers like Samuel
Beckett and Harold Pinter.
Third, the performance history of the play sheds some light on its possible meanings,
both at the time of its composition and in later interpretations. The play opened in the
Soviet Union in 1946, and therefore reached its first audiences in Russian. Priestley
sympathized with socialism broadly, but was not a member of any one political party,
as his biographers note. Although An Inspector Calls is set some thirty-five years
before its first performance, its consideration of industrial power and human worth
was still very much an issue at the time of its debut. Priestley weighs what blame
belongs to whom, and how ill-considered actions on the individual scale can have
fatal, if unintentional, consequences. Anyone watching the play in the 1940s might
see the heedlessness of Arthur, the aloofness of Sybil, the outward guilt of Sheila, or
the drunkenness of Eric both as personal flaws and as potentially allegorical
statements about national responsibility in continental Europe, the UK, and the
United States.
The revival of An Inspector Calls in the 1990s demonstrates that the play’s
preoccupations resonate beyond the Cold War period. Indeed, after the collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991, the relationship between capital and labor, or between
management and those doing the work, was of particular interest. So was the idea
that democratic values might potentially have prevailed over the rigid bureaucratic
governance of the USSR and its satellite states. The openness with which the play
ends is, similarly, an opportunity for re-evaluation, as Priestley never explains fully
how individual crimes contribute to a more general guilt or innocence in the play’s
main characters.
Power and Conflict Poetry
You will tackle this question on Literature Paper 2: Modern Texts and Poetry.
Here is what the question will look like:
Any one of the 15 poems might be the named poem and you will
have to select the ‘one other poem’ to compare it to. You will not
have this second poem with you in the exam and so you will need a
detailed knowledge of all 15!
Model Answer
Both ‘Bayonet Charge’ and ‘Remains’ present the realistic effects of war on an individual, however,
‘Bayonet Charge’ presents inner turmoil of a solider during action whereas ‘Remains’ presents the
conflicted mind of a solider after conflict. Hughes – poet laureate from 1984-98 – was inspired by
Wilfred Owen’s ‘Spring Offensive’ and the effects of war he felt through his father to explore a
realistic portrayal of conflict. Armitage aimed to explore the effects of war on discharged servicemen
in a collection ‘The Not Dead’ which was inspired by testimony of soldiers from the Gulf War.
Both poets present the horrific nature of war, however, Armitage does this in a colloquial fashion,
giving a sense of heightened realism, whereas Hughes in a conflicted way. Hughes uses a semantic
field of bodily parts – ‘belly’ ‘arm’ ‘eye’ ‘chest’ – to emphasise the physical impact of war. The fact
that it is his own equipment which threatens his body rather than the enemy suggests the awful
reality of war. Hughes repeats the word ‘raw’ ‘In raw’, to emphasise the confusion of the solider, he
is unable to rationalise and think calmly. The word ‘raw’ has connotations of being exposed and
stripped of safety, therefore the repetition highlights his vulnerability. Hughes uses enjambment and
caesuras to show the soldiers inner turmoil. He tries to control the situation and think clearly –
caesuras – however the chaos of conflict is overwhelming – enjambment.
Armitage however uses colloquial language to emphasise the shock. The phrase ‘pain itself, the
image of agony’, is very simplistic, however, the caesura mid-line forces the reader to pause and
reflect on the situation. The word ‘agony’ has connotations of intense suffering, therefore allowing
the reader to create their own ‘image’.
Armitage uses the metaphoric verb ‘every round as it rips through his life’ which implies an even
more awful action as personifies the weapon to purposefully harm him. The verb ‘rips’ implies a
longer action, allowing the reader to create a vision of the scene.
Both poets present the guilt felt by a solider, however Armitage presents guilt towards humans
whereas Hughes presents guilt towards nature.
Hughes uses a semantic field of nature – ‘green hedge’ ‘air’ ‘yellow hare’ ‘green hedge’ – to
emphasise the immorality of conflict. The ‘green hedge’ could be the soldier’s imagination, as he
attempts to switch back into a charging mood by tempting himself with the pure imagery of nature.
The colour ‘yellow’ has connotations of happiness and freedom, therefore to place a ‘yellow hare’ in
a warzone highlights the destruction of happiness and freedom.
Hughes mocks patriotism – ‘king, honour, human dignity, etcetera’ – to present his view that conflict
is futile and wrong, especially when it causes the destruction of nature. Armitage uses a cyclical
structure with the repetition of ‘probably armed, possibly not’, which each carry an equal weighted
meter, showing the inner conflict of the soldier.
Armitage uses the phrase ‘his bloody life in my bloody hands’ suggesting that he has no escape from
guilt now. The two meanings of ‘bloody’ could either suggest his anger at the whole situation and his
actions, or the permanent effect on him and the immovable guilt that ‘remains’ on his ‘hands’.
Overall, both Hughes and Armitage present the traumatic effects of conflict on individuals, however
Armitage does this more effectively as he explores the long term effects and possible PTSD that may
follow experiences of war.
Tissue Imtiaz Dharker 2006
The poem uses tissue as an extended metaphor for life. She describes how life, like tissue is fragile. However, she also discusses some of the literal uses of paper that are intertwined with our lives, such as recording names in the Koran- She then goes onto to discuss how we are made from tissue ( living tissue which is our skin) emphasising that life is fragile. Dharker has Pakistani origins & was raised in Glasgow. Many of her poems looks at issues of identify.
The Emigrée Carol Rumens 1993
The speaker speaks about a city that she left as a child. The speaker has a purely positive view of the city. The city she recalls has since changed, perhaps it was scene of conflict, however, she still protects the memory of her city. The city may not be a real place but represent a time, emotion -perhaps the speaker’s childhood. According to Ben Wilkinson (critic), Rumens has a ‘fascination with elsewhere.’
Kamikaze Beatrice Garland 2013
Kamikaze is the unofficial name given to Japanese pilots who were send on a suicide mission. The mission was considered one of honour but this poem is about a pilot who aborted the mission. Hi daughter imagines that her father was reminded of his childhood & the beauty of nature & life whilst on the mission. When he returned home he was shunned.
Checking Out Me History John Agard 2007
The narrator discusses his identity & emphasises how identity is closely linked to history & understanding your own history. In school he was taught British history & not about his Caribbean roots to which he feels resentful. He mocks some of the pointless things he was taught & contrasts the nonsense topics with admirable black figures.
Key Words and Spellings
Please add your own as we read
Stanza Caesura Enjambment Regular Irregular
Rhyme Rhythm Repetition Simile Metaphor
Persona Scheme Context Alliteration Rhetorical
Emotive Structure Form Monologue Sonnet
Connotation Couplet Hyperbole Chartered Manacles
Romantic Visage Pedestal Boundless Woe
Appals Blights Hearse Spools Supplements
Octave Sestet Volta Personification Juxtaposition
Oxymoron
Term Three: Macbeth
You will tackle this question on Literature Paper 1: Shakespeare and the 19th
Century Novel. Here is what the question will look like:
This question is worth 30 marks and will require an essay response of around 700-800 words.
Model Response
Ambition is an important theme in Macbeth and is the driving force of the play because Shakespeare allows ambition to overpower Macbeth’s morals when he kills Duncan. Eventhough the witches and Lady Macbeth had been allowed to influence Macbeth, he may not have killed Duncan if his ambition wasn’t so strong. This essay will discuss the ways in which Shakespeare presents ambition in the extract and the play as a whole, and how he does this. Shakespeare shows that ambition changes even the most noble people in this speech. He allows Lady Macbeth to describe Macbeth’s nature as being ‘too full o’th’ milk of human kindness” in her soliloquy (allowing the audience to hear her thoughts). The noun ‘milk’ has connotations of purity and innocence, implying that macbeth isn’t evil enough to act on his ambitions. However, during macbeth’s reign after becoming king, he is described as a ‘butcher’, a powerful adjective that emphasises Macbeth’s cruelty and the amount of people he has killed without reason. This change in character from being too kind and innocent to becoming a tyrant suprises the audience and conveys the dangers of having ambitions that leads to bad deeds. Furthermore, Shakespeare also presents ambition as being able to take over one’s morals and reasons. In Lady Macbeth’s speech, Shakespeare allows her to say ‘Art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it’. The noun ‘illness’ creates an impression to the readers of ambition being different from acting on it, and describing it as an ‘illness’ emphasises the amount of destruction it can cause to the audience. ‘Illness’ could also suggest that acting on ambition can cause someone to become without morals and kindness. Macbeth also acknowledges his own ‘vaulting ambition’ after listing all the reasons not to kill Duncan. The metaphor suggests that macbeth’s ambition is stronger than his moral conscience and is the only reason left for him to murder Duncan Macbeth’s ambition is also contrasted with Banquo’s, who was also present when the witches gave the prophecies. Macbeth immediatly believes the witches, and when he becomes Thane, proving that the first prediction had come true, he begins to believe them more and acts on his ambitions to become king. Banquo, however, is the opposite of Macbeth. Although he does believe the witches, he does not act on his ambitions and even suspects that Macbeth has “play’dst most foully for’t”. This contrast in attitudes towards ambition and the suspenseful two-fold structure of ‘Macbeth’ that sees his rise to power and his downfall further emphasises the destructive nature of ambition, but also conveys to the audience that being able to control your ambitions can prevent a tragedy like Macbeth’s to occur. In conclusion, Shakespeare presents ambition as being able to change people, take over morals and reasons and can lead to one’s downfall if it isn’t controlled. This allows Shakespeare to also convey to the audience the destruction that someone would experience if they attempted to assassinate King James I of England at the time.
Character analysis: Lady Macbeth Article by:Michael Donkor Published:19 May 2017
Focussing on characterisation, language and imagery, Michael Donkor analyses Lady
Macbeth in Act 1, Scene 5 of Macbeth, and considers how this scene fits into the play
as a whole.
Key quotation
LADY MACBETH The raven himself is hoarse That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Under my battlements. Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-ful Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood; Stop up th' access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between Th' effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murth'ring ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry 'Hold, hold!' (1.5.38–54)
Setting the scene
Act 1, Scene 5 of Macbeth is set in Macbeth’s castle in Inverness. It forms part of the audience’s first encountering of Lady Macbeth.
Lady Macbeth has just read Macbeth’s letter, which outlines the weird sisters’ prophecies. She proceeds to express to herself her concern that Macbeth does not possess the steeliness or desire to use underhand means to acquire the glittering titles the witches have said lay before him.
The passage we’re interested in here follows this directly. It opens with a messenger interrupting Lady Macbeth’s meditations on the letter. The attendant informs Lady Macbeth of her husband and King Duncan’s impending arrival (‘The king comes here to-night’ (1.5.30)). The passage moves on to Lady Macbeth resuming her interrupted soliloquy, now in chillingly resolute mood as she readies herself for the imminent killing of Duncan. Then Macbeth arrives and she instructs him to leave the planning and execution of their bloody plan in her hands.
How does Shakespeare present Lady Macbeth here?
In this scene, Lady Macbeth’s characterisation is used to continue the play’s steady ratcheting up of tension. The suspense of this passage is enhanced by the fact that Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy after the messenger has left is uttered in a stolen moment of stillness before action and fretful dialogue commences. It is a fleeting opportunity for her to consider her own feelings and responses to the unfolding events before Macbeth enters with weaknesses that will inevitably require her ‘tending’. This time pressure accounts for the strikingly condensed nature of the soliloquy. In just 17 lines, the audience are offered a dense series of images that speak of Lady
Macbeth’s own complexities, contradictions and itchy anxiety about the ungodly acts she and her husband are about to commit.
The soliloquy’s opening image – a croaking raven – is a telling one. The bird not only has associations of ill omens but was also renowned for eating the decayed flesh of fallen soldiers on battlefields, closely linking to the idea of the Macbeths – and Lady Macbeth in particular – being a sinister, parasitical couple feeding on the lives of those more powerful and benevolent than themselves.
This idea recurs (but taking the argument in a different direction) when Lady Macbeth calls on ‘spirits’ for assistance; in some ways what she seeks is for her own body to be decomposed. She asks dark agents to ‘come’ and strip her of her femininity, to ‘unsex’ her body, using a series of listed imperatives that foreshadow the persuasive techniques she will subsequently use on Macbeth towards the end of the scene.
But, having called upon malevolent presences to help disintegrate her body, she does not want to remain in a sexless, physically diminished state. She also wants to be reconstituted and refigured as a being hard and armoured like her warrior husband; as a monstrous being with unnaturally thickened blood and breasts that produce deadly poisonous 'gall'.
That Lady Macbeth calls on mystical, external forces to assist her with this transformation is worth interrogating too, for two reasons. Firstly, it clearly gives weight to the reading of the character being a fourth witch, whose speech here has incantatory rhythms that lend it a distinctly supernatural quality. Secondly, this request for the support of others also perhaps reveals a sense of lacking beneath the surface of Lady Macbeth’s boldly assured malevolence: Lady Macbeth does not 'naturally' possess the zeal and evil required to undertake her plan, and so has to seek out the power of 'murth'ring ministers' to help her do it.
Alternatively, rather than interpreting Lady Macbeth's requests for dark assistance literally, we can see them as more metaphorical utterances: the speech is, in fact, a kind of 'pep talk' directed to herself and designed to undermine the merest inkling of 'remorse' she might feel. It is a moment of self-encouragement to help bolster and 'thick[en]' the most reprehensible parts of her character.
Images of obscurity abound in this passage: 'dark ... sightless ... thick night ... pall … dunnest smoke', all clearly chiming with Lady Macbeth's desire for her wrongdoing to pass unseen by prying eyes. These images serve as a counterpart to Macbeth's transparency – his open face where 'men can read strange matters' without any difficulty. These allusions, of course, carry with them the obvious associations of impure intent and evil. But, in this instance, they also reflect Lady Macbeth's need to conceal and hide her own weakness and misgivings from herself and from Macbeth. With such a reading in mind, when Macbeth enters and Lady Macbeth presents him with careful guidance about how to dissemble, her instruction about controlling appearance to ensure that guilt does not reveal itself is as much for herself as it is for Macbeth.
How does this presentation of Lady Macbeth fit into the play as a whole?
The most familiar, recognisable reading of Lady Macbeth’s role in the play is that she is the puppet master who pulls – often mercilessly yanks – at Macbeth’s strings. Several aspects of her portrayal in Act 1, Scene 5 add to this view. When Macbeth enters, not only does she shape and direct his behaviour, she also speaks significantly more than he does. Macbeth’s utterances are concise and practical, hers expansive, detailed and richly embroidered with imagery, reflecting the elaborate workings of a mind masterminding a dastardly plan. The perception of Lady Macbeth as the powerful, motivating force behind the couple’s scheme is of course sharpened in Act 1, Scene 7 when, using terrifying images of infanticide and her ‘undaunted mettle’ (1.7.73)
,she taunts Macbeth for his lack of masculine resolve and reignites his passion to pursue power at any cost.
However, the view that insecurities lurk within Lady Macbeth's outward strength connects our extract with her final appearance in the play, in Act 5, Scene 1. In this later scene after the Macbeths’ killing spree, Lady Macbeth’s mind is ‘infected’ (5.1.72) by guilt and madness (as opposed to being possessed by demonic powers as in Act 1, Scene 5). Her speech is presented in loose, unravelling prose where questions, repetitions and reversals show a fully exposed frailty and an anxiety that ‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten [her] little hand’ (5.4.51).
As well as her vulnerability having developed between Act 1, Scene 5 and this final encounter with her, in the latter scene her attitude towards darkness shows progression too. Previously, Lady Macbeth had courted darkness and dimness. But by the end of the play her desire is for clarity; to be free of dirty, blemishing entities. She wants to be rid of ‘damn'd spot[s]’ (5.1.35) and the ‘murky’ (5.1.36) nature of the Hell that awaits her provokes great fear.
Themes
The thematic complexity of this passage explains why it continues to fascinate audiences. In a play that, in many ways, presents us with a world turned upside down – where ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ (1.1.11) – this scene offers us a glimpse of conventional gender roles being inverted. Lady Macbeth’s wish to be symbolically ‘defeminised’ is seemingly granted with great speed: her activity, forcefulness and engagement that are present as soon as Macbeth arrives shows that she is taking on characteristics that an Elizabethan audience would have identified as being more ‘masculine’.
How has this scene been interpreted?
Trevor Nunn’s 1979 version of the play (recorded for television), with Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth and Ian McKellen, as her husband remains a towering and chilling production of the text, of which Act 1, Scene 5 is a particular high point. Here, Dench’s performance is multifaceted. Often, her lines are delivered with an icy austerity, in suitably hushed, hissed tones. Dench’s call to the ‘spirits’ is presented as the character engaging in a real, meaningful dialogue with these presences; it is a conversation so powerful and real to Lady Macbeth that its implications shock and frighten her, making her voice waver, making her squeal with fear.
Macbeth’s arrival in the scene brings about a subtle shift in Dench’s performance. Rather than aggressively cajoling her husband into following her ‘fell purposes’, instead Dench interestingly uses her feminine wiles – using womanliness she renounced seconds before – to flirt with and coerce Macbeth into action. Their conversation here, and Lady Macbeth’s persuasion, is full of seduction and unsettling sensuality.
Key Contextual Information (AO3)
Political Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in 1606. It is important to understand the political context in which it was written, as that is the key to the main theme of the play, which is that excessive ambition will have terrible consequences. Shakespeare was writing for the theatre during the reigns of two monarchs, Queen Elizabeth I and King James I. The plays he wrote during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, are often seen to embody the generally happy, confident and optimistic mood of the Elizabethans. However, those he wrote during James's reign, such as Macbeth and Hamlet, are darker and more cynical, reflecting the insecurities of the Jacobean period. Macbeth was written the year after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, she had no children, or even nephews or nieces. The throne was offered to James Stuart, James VI of Scotland, who then became James I of Britain. He was a distant cousin of Elizabeth, being descended from Margaret Tudor, the sister of Elizabeth's grandfather, Henry the Eighth. James was the son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, who had been deposed and imprisoned when he was a baby, and later executed on Elizabeth's orders. Brought up by Protestant regents, James maintained a Protestant regime in Scotland when he came of age, and so was an acceptable choice for England which had become firmly Protestant under Elizabeth. However, his accession was by no means a popular choice with everyone. Since he was not a direct descendant of Elizabeth, there were other relatives who believed they also had a strong claim and James feared that discontented factions might gather around them. At first the Catholics had hoped James might support them, since his mother had been such a staunch Catholic, but when they realised this would not happen conspiracies developed, one of which was the Gunpowder Plot. Guy Fawkes and his men tried to blow up James and his parliament in 1605. The conspirators were betrayed, and horribly tortured on the rack until they confessed. They were then executed in the most brutal fashion as a warning to other would-be traitors. Shakespeare's play Macbeth is to some extent a cautionary tale, warning any other potential regicides (king-killers) of the awful fate that will inevitably overtake them.
Philosophical Religious thinkers in the Middle Ages had upheld the idea of 'The Great Chain of Being'. This was the belief that God had designed an ordered system for both nature and humankind within which every creature and person had an allotted place. It was considered an offence against God for anyone to try to alter their station in life. After death, however, all would be raised in the kingdom of heaven, if they respected God's will. Since royal rank was bestowed by God, it was a sin to aspire to it. This doctrine – a convenient one for King James – was still widely held in Shakespeare's day.
Although his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was a beautiful and charming woman, James I was aware he was ugly and lacking in the charisma which inspired loyalty. But he was an intelligent and well-educated man, and espoused various beliefs which he felt would keep
his position secure. One of these was the so-called 'divine right of kings'. This was the belief that the power of monarchs was given directly by God, and thus monarchs were answerable only to God. Any opposition to the King was an attack on God himself, and therefore sacrilege, the most heinous of sins. The anointing ceremony at the coronation made the King virtually divine. All the Stuart kings strongly supported the belief in their 'divine right' to rule as it was an effective safeguard of their position. They even claimed Christ-like powers of healing. In Macbeth, Shakespeare alludes to King Edward of England successfully healing the sick: 'such sanctity hath heaven given his hand'. Queen Anne was the last British monarch who used 'the Queen's touch' in this way.
Historical Shakespeare's plot is only partly based on fact. Macbeth was a real eleventh century Scottish king, but the historical Macbeth, who had a valid right to the throne, reigned capably in Scotland from 1040 till 1057. He succeeded Duncan, whom he had defeated in battle, but the real Duncan was a weak man, around Macbeth's own age, not the respected elderly figure we meet in the play. In reality, Macbeth was succeeded by his own stepson, not by Duncan's son, Malcolm, who came to the throne later. The Stuart kings claimed descent from Banquo, but Banquo is a mythical figure who never really existed. Shakespeare found his version of the story of Macbeth in the Chronicles of Holinshed, a historian of his own time. Holinshed does include a Banquo in his version, but he is also a traitor who assists Macbeth in the murder. As a tribute to the Stuarts, and James in particular, Shakespeare presents Banquo as a wise, noble and regal figure who arouses jealousy in Macbeth as much for his own good qualities as for the promise the witches make to him of founding a dynasty.
Shakespeare and the Court During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare's acting company was called the 'Chamberlain's Men', and it is known that they performed for the court. After the accession of James they changed their name to the 'King's Men' as a tribute to him. The patronage of the King and court was obviously valuable to Shakespeare. In Macbeth, Shakespeare seeks to flatter and please the King in various ways. Macbeth, the character who usurps the place of a lawful King, is shown as losing everything as a result – he becomes hated and demonised by all his subjects, as does his wife, who supports him in his crime. Banquo, whom the Stuarts claimed as their ancestor, is presented in a completely positive light. When the witches show Macbeth the future, he sees a line of kings descended from Banquo that seems to 'stretch out to the crack of doom'. This flatters King James with the promise of a long-standing dynasty, although in fact James's father, Charles I, would be executed, and the Stuart line was to die out with Queen Anne in 1714.
Shakespeare also included other enthusiasms of the King in the play. James had written a book called Basilikon Doron, which looks at the theme of kingship. In the book, James identifies the ideal king as one who does his duty to God and to his country and who is also a man of spotless personal integrity. In the play, Shakespeare, too, explores this topic, with the character of Malcolm representing the template of the ideal king. In addition, the idealised portrait of Edward the Confessor, the 'holy king' who has the power literally to heal his people, would come across to a contemporary audience as an indirect tribute to James himself. James was also very interested in the supernatural, and had written a paper
called Daemonologie on the subject. During his reign as King of Scotland, James is known to have been directly involved in some witch trials at North Berwick. Women were regularly burnt as witches, and Shakespeare presents his witches unequivocally as powerful and evil emissaries of the devil. In his day, the majority of the general public, too, believed in witches and the power of the supernatural, and the witch scenes would have been taken very seriously.
Key Words and Spellings
Please add your own as we read
Desert Incantation Tryst Pentameter Iambic
Trochaic Tetrameter Noble Regicide Divine
Succession Tragedy Hubris Hamartia Tragedy
Foreshadowing Irony Soliloquy Supernatural Usurp
Superstitious Banquo Heinous Manipulative Traitor
Prophecy Eerie Surreal Malevolent Sinister
Vulnerable Ambition Conscience Appearance Reality
Sinister Potential Valiant Aside Hallucination
Monologue Upheaval Clandestine Fatalistic Bloodlust
Foreboding Disdain Determination
English Language Paper 1: Explorations in Creative
Reading and Writing
Paper 1: Explorations in Creative Reading and Writing
What's assessed
Section A: Reading
one literature fiction text
Section B: Writing
descriptive or narrative writing
Assessed
written exam: 1 hour 45 minutes
80 marks
50% of GCSE
Questions
Reading (40 marks) (25%)– one single text
1 short form question (1 x 4 marks)
2 longer form questions (2 x 8 marks)
1 extended question (1 x 20 marks)
Writing (40 marks) (25%)
1 extended writing question (24 marks for content, 16 marks for technical
accuracy)
Question 1 – Find 4 things
Question 2 – Language
Question 3 – Structure
Question 4 – To what extent do you agree..?
English Language Paper 2: Writers’ Viewpoints
and Perspectives
What's assessed
Section A: Reading
one non-fiction text and one literary non-fiction text
Section B: Writing
writing to present a viewpoint
Assessed
written exam: 1 hour 45 minutes
80 marks
50% of GCSE
Questions
Reading (40 marks) (25%) – two linked texts
1 short form question (1 x 4 marks)
2 longer form questions (1 x 8, 1 x 12 marks)
1 extended question (1 x 16 marks)
Writing (40 marks) (25%)
1 extended writing question (24 marks for content, 16 marks for technical
accuracy)
Question 1 – Select 4 true statements
Question 2 – Summarise the differences
Question 3 – Language
Question 4 – Compare viewpoints and perspectives
Academic Writing - Analytical Verbs A strong assertion requires a strong analytical verb. Your assertions should have one of the verbs from the list below, to show what exactly you aim to prove. A good analytical verb ensures that your essay does not merely indicate something that happens in the book, but rather, what you think the author intended.
Advocates Compares Alludes to Articulates Asserts Clarifies
Collates Classifies Characterizes Bolsters Builds Balances
Categorizes Depicts Defends Debates Critiques Creates
Confirms Concludes Continues Details Establishes Employs Emphasizes Elicits Elevates Differentiates Develops Expresses
Facilitates Frames Gathers Generates Guides Highlights
Identifies Illustrates Implements Implies Perpetuates Moves Integrates Presents Portrays Promotes Propels Proposes
Raises Provoke Reduces Reinforces Represents Reveals
Revitalizes Substantiates States Strengthens Suggests Exaggerates
Examples:
At the start of the novella, Dickens exaggerates the character of Scrooge,
placing emphasis on his negative traits in order to generate a feeling of disgust
in the reader. This establishes Scrooge as an archetypal villain and, through his
subsequent change, allows Dickens to demonstrate the transformation that he
believes is needed in society.
Through the voice of the Inspector, Priestley articulates his own socialist views.
The cool and collected nature of the Inspector contrasts with the Birling family
and their hyperbolic behaviour and allows Priestly to present another way.
Practice Questions: A Christmas Carol
When Scrooge awoke, it was so dark, that looking out of bed, he could scarcely distinguish
the transparent window from the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to
pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes, when the chimes of a neighbouring church struck
the four quarters. So he listened for the hour.
To his great astonishment the heavy bell went on from six to seven, and from seven to
eight, and regularly up to twelve; then stopped. Twelve! It was past two when he went to
bed. The clock was wrong. An icicle must have got into the works. Twelve!
He touched the spring of his repeater, to correct this most preposterous clock. Its rapid little
pulse beat twelve: and stopped.
“Why, it isn’t possible,” said Scrooge, “that I can have slept through a whole day and far into
another night. It isn’t possible that anything has happened to the sun, and this is twelve at
noon!”
The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed, and groped his way to the
window. He was obliged to rub the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing-gown before he
could see anything; and could see very little then. All he could make out was, that it was still
very foggy and extremely cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and fro,
and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been if night had beaten off
bright day, and taken possession of the world. This was a great relief, because “three days
after sight of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order,” and so forth,
would have become a mere United States’ security if there were no days to count by.
Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought it over and over and
over, and could make nothing of it. The more he thought, the more perplexed he was; and
the more he endeavoured not to think, the more he thought.
Marley’s Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved within himself, after
mature inquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again, like a strong spring
released, to its first position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through,
“Was it a dream or not?”
Scrooge lay in this state until the chime had gone three quarters more, when he
remembered, on a sudden, that the Ghost had warned him of a visitation when the bell
tolled one. He resolved to lie awake until the hour was passed; and, considering that he
could no more go to sleep than go to Heaven, this was perhaps the wisest resolution in his
power.
The quarter was so long, that he was more than once convinced he must have sunk into a
doze unconsciously, and missed the clock. At length it broke upon his listening ear.
Starting with this extract, how does Dickens present the theme of time?
Remember to write about:
• Scrooge in the extract
• Scrooge in the novella as a whole
A hand plan is a really easy way to plan our essays. Our thesis statement acts
as an introduction and outlines our response to the question. Each ‘finger’
then represents a different point that we can make and our conclusion sums
up our argument, linking back to the thesis statement that we started with.
Thesis Statement
– an overarching
response to the
question
One way that
Dickens presents
the theme of
time and why.
One way that
Dickens presents
the theme of
time and why.
One way that
Dickens presents
the theme of
time and why.
Refer back to
your thesis – why
has Dickens
chosen to present
time in this way?
Practice Questions: An Inspector Calls
1) How and why does Sheila change in An Inspector Calls?
2) How does Priestley present ideas about family in An Inspector
Calls?
3) How does Priestley use the Inspector to promote his own agenda?
Practice Questions: Power and Conflict Poetry
1) How do the poets present the loss of power in Ozymandias and
one other poem?
2) How do the poets present the power of nature in Kamikaze and
one other poem?
3) How do the poets present the effects of conflict in Charge of the
Light Brigade and one other poem?
Practice Question: Macbeth
At this point in the play, Banquo and Macbeth have just met the witches. The witches have
just told Macbeth he will one day be the King of Scotland.
BANQUO Good sir, why do you start; and seem to fear Things that do sound so fair? I' the name of truth, Are ye fantastical, or that indeed Which outwardly ye show? My noble partner You greet with present grace and great prediction Of noble having and of royal hope, That he seems rapt withal: to me you speak not. If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear Your favours nor your hate. First Witch Hail! Second Witch Hail! Third Witch Hail! First Witch Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. Second Witch Not so happy, yet much happier. Third Witch Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none: So all hail, Macbeth and Banquo! First Witch Banquo and Macbeth, all hail! MACBETH Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more: By Sinel's death I know I am thane of Glamis; But how of Cawdor? The thane of Cawdor lives, A prosperous gentleman; and to be king Stands not within the prospect of belief, No more than to be Cawdor. Say from whence You owe this strange intelligence? or why Upon this blasted heath you stop our way With such prophetic greeting? Speak, I charge you. (The Witches vanish)
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10
15
20
25
Starting with this conversation, explain how far Shakespeare presents Macbeth as a
character who believes in the supernatural power of the witches.
Write about:
How Shakespeare presents Macbeth’s reaction to the witches here
How Shakespeare presents his beliefs in them elsewhere in the play.
Further Reading and Support
Helpful websites
www.sparknotes.com
www.youtube.com/user/mrbruff
www.nfs.sparknotes.com
www.bbc.com/education
Complimentary Reading
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Othello by William Shakespeare
Television and Movie Resources
A Christmas Carol
Macbeth
English isn’t as solitary as an oyster! Check out the links between English and your other subjects:
Maths -